a little improbable
In this sense our consciousness might appear as an ordered and deterministic structure, capable of behaving like and being explicable in the same terms as other large scale structures in the world. However, this is not so. For if we, through introspection, try to examine the way in which we are conscious, in a sense to look at the atoms of our consciousness, this regular structure disappears. Our consciousness does not actually work in such an ordered way. We only nurture an illusion if we try to hold to the view that our consciousness is at root an ordered deterministic structure. True, we can create the large scale designs of the architect, the abstract mathematical systems, a cello concerto, but anyone who has built such structures within their consciousness knows that this is not achieved by a linear deterministic route.
Our consciousness is at its root a maverick, ever moving, jumping from one perception, feeling, thought, to another. We can never hold it still or focus it at a point for long. Like the quantum nature of matter, the more we try to hold our consciousness to a fixed point, the greater the uncertainty in its energy will become. So when we focus and narrow our consciousness to a fixed center, it is all the more likely to suddenly jump with a great rush of energy to some seemingly unrelated aspect of our inner life. We all have such experiences each moment of the day. As in our daily work we try to focus our mind upon some problem only to suddenly experience a shift to some other domain in ourselves, another image or emotional current intrudes then vanishes again, like an ephemeral virtual particle in quantum theory.
Those who begin to work upon their consciousness through some kinds of meditative exercises will experience these quantum uncertainties in the field of consciousness in a strong way.
In treating our consciousness as if it were a digital computer or deterministic machine after the model of 19th century science, I believe we foster a limited and false view of our inner world. We must now take the step towards a quantum view of consciousness, recognizing that at its base and root our consciousness behaves like the ever flowing sea of the sub-atomic world. The ancient hermeticists pictured consciousness as the Inner Mercury. Those who have experienced the paradoxical way in which the metal Mercury is both dense and metallic and yet so elusive, flowing and breaking up into small globules, and just as easily coming together again, will see how perceptive the alchemists were of the inner nature of consciousness, in choosing this analogy. Educators who treat the consciousness of children as if it were a filing cabinet to be filled with ordered arrays of knowledge are hopelessly wrong."
- Adam McLean
It is my emptiness among them
While they drift farther away in the invisible morning."
- W. S. Merwin
"I have always been pretty much outside it all, and I don't mean just the art I try to send down through my typewriter, although there it appears I stand outside the gate also. It appears from many rejections that I do not write poetry at all. Or as a dear friend told me the other day: "You do not understand the true meaning of poetry. You are not lyrical. You do not sing! You write bar talk. The type of thing you write I can hear in a bar on any day."
I have always been one of those people who do everything wrong. This is essentially because I am not involved in the march.
Nothing is quite real to me. Streetcars. bombs. bugs. women. lightbulbs. areas of grass. All unreal. I am outside. Death which is true enough, even this appears unreal. Not so long ago I was in the charity ward of a hospital in one of our greater cities. This is wording it badly, the whole god damned hospital was a charity ward, a place to crawl around in, a kind of purgatory on earth where the dying are allowed to lie in the stink of their sheets for days and the appearance of a nurse is redemption and the appearance of a doctor is like God himself. All this is pretty much outside. They do keep the men and women in separate wards. This is about all the individuality, all the identity we are allowed to retain: what's left of the gender."
- Charles Bukowski
letters from Screams from the Balcony
"My reality is that God speaks to you every day. There's an inner voice, and when you hear it, you get a little tingle in your medulla oblongata at the back of your neck, a little shiver, and at two o'clock in the morning, everything's really quiet and you meditate and you got the candles, you got the incense and you've been chanting, and all of a sudden you hear this voice: 'Write this down.' It is just an inner voice, and you trust it. That voice will never take you to the desert."
- Carlos Santana
"Sometimes I think the people to feel the saddest for are people who once knew what profoundness was, but who lost or became numb to the sensation of wonder - people who closed the door that leads us into the secret world - or who had the doors closed for them by time and neglect and decisions made in times of weakness."
- Douglas Coupland
"Traveling is a fool's paradise . . . I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Those who speak in spiritual terms routinely refer to God as the creator but seldom see creator as the literal term for artist.
I am suggesting you take the term creator quite literally. You are seeking to forge a creative alliance, artist to artist, with the Great Creator."
- Thich Nhat Hanh
"Life would be so much easier if we just had the source code."
- Oscar Migueis
"More importantly, it is hard because I do not really know the answers in any final way. I am not blessed to be one of those people who have had such profound personal experiences that there is no question of doubt of any sort, the kind of person who, as a result of some altered-state experience such as a near-death experience, knows at an extremely deep level what the meaning of life is about. I have had some little hints here and there, but I do not write from that space of doubt-free knowing, although I respect and try to learn from such people. At times I wish I did know, at other times I am glad that I have to live my life without the possible fetters of apparent certainty."
- Charles T. Tart
"Every individual is at some point torn between the splendid urge to go on towards understanding, and the craving to go back to safety."
- W. H. Sheldon
"It is a release, like a dip in a healing, cool, fresh river. Now I am washed away in the river; after so much fussing, I am torn away and alone in the current. But I can swim, or rather, float. The self I held, I left with my towel on the shore, but I'm still alive; I haven't drowned or died. Pieces of what I imagined I had to grip to me come floating along beside me. The current of the world is unraveling in faces and forms. Without my will the universe unrolls, and fills my arms with muscles, my heart with human concerns. The scintillating milky way of my back is a winking and shimmering constellation; my body itself is a river, a continent of rivers, a flickering, vibrating, shore less ocean of currents and channels, unfathomable, beginning less, endless. The living ride on life like the foam on the crest of a surge on the cosmic ocean."
- Paul Fleischman
As you move up and out of the tighter part of the global psychology into a spiritual open space, and as you close the perceived gap, you will see how the external universe is talking to you. You especially take notice of external symbols or events that are strange and unusual.
The events - and your presence in that moment as the observer of those events - make them an external manifestation of you because you are there to watch it. The meanings rest primarily in a degree of endless potentials, but how many potential meanings there are is not important. What is important is what it means to you, for watching the event is personal. It's you talking to yourself. What it is saying is in your feelings. External symbols can represent either some part of your waking intellect (such as synchronistic events that often reflect thoughts in your mind) or it may reflect a part of your deep inner - self, the subconscious self. Both are possible.
If you can immediately relate to the symbol, you can attempt the interpretation of it from the intellect. If you don't get an immediate clue from your life's circumstances, then the symbol is reflecting some deep inner part of you.
There's a knack to interpretation, but you soon get good at it. It helps you to see that you are watching a movie out there, which reflects impulses and ideas that are internal.
Sometimes external symbols will be grouped together, several at a time. Some symbols you don't unravel until years later. They are predictions, signposts to the future, or visions that lead you in a direction from which the answer will eventually come."
"The universe - at - large talks to you - especially when there is a special need - at a synchronistic moment. You ask a question, and something happens by chance at that precise moment to answer your question. Or, someone unrelated to the situation or the question answers you, without them realizing that what they are saying is answering your question.
The universe - at - large has a bloody good idea what's going on, and in certain circumstances it talks to you if you settle down and listen. You just have to be in the right spot at the right moment, have no fear, read the signs, and plunge into your beliefs and back your fleeting impressions and so forth."
- Stuart Wilde
Sixth Sense
"I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorized. I imagined. I made discoveries."
- Humphrey Davy
"My ideas succeeded one another with extreme rapidity, thoughts rushed like a torrent through the mind, as if their velocity had been suddenly accelerated by the bursting of a barrier."
- Peter Roget
"I knew, I understood, I actually was, far more than I normally knew, understood and was. I saw the meaning; the meaning, that is, of the universe, of life on earth, and of man. But when I came to place the meaning in words, I found myself writing; "Within and within and within and within." The sheer flood of meaning was so much that it was beyond expression."
- R. H. Ward
"I could not find words . . . which would enable me to remember what had occurred even for myself, still less to convey it to somebody else. Everything was linked together, everything is connected to something else; in order to describe the first impressions, the first sensations, it is necessary to describe all at once. Such was the flood of impressions, of intuitions, of meaning, that in the state, a man can go mad from one ash tray."
- P. D. Ouspensky
A New Model of the Universe
"I cannot live with myself any longer." This was the thought that kept repeating itself in my mind. Then suddenly I became aware of what a peculiar thought it was. "Am I one or two?"
- Eckhart Tolle
" . . . there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter but is, on the contrary, a living Presence."
- R. M. Bucke
Cosmic Consciousness
" Not being alienated from one's own essential nature is itself a field of blessings."
- Hui-Neng
- Oscar Wilde
"In my writings people often miss the customary respect for reality, and when I paint, the trees have faces and the houses laugh or dance or weep, but whether the tree is a pear or a chestnut, that for the most part cannot be determined. I must accept this reproach. I admit that my own life frequently appears exactly like a legend. I often see and feel the outer world connected and in harmony with my inner world in a way I can only call magical."
- Hermann Hesse
Individuality?
is not of the substance of elements.
It is an organism, indivisibly
occupied
by elementary objects of a divergent character:
if you
were to attempt division, these parts
would die.
Myself,
for instance: an entire dramatic company.
Enter an ancestor, prophetic;
enter a hero, brutal
a rake, alcoholic, to argue
with a learned professor.
A lyrical beauty, rolling her eyes
heavenward, a case
of chronic infatuation -
enter a heavy father,
to take care of that.
enter a liberal uncle - to arbitrate. . . .
Aunt Chatterbox gossiping in a corner.
Chambermaid Lewdie, giggling.
And I, watching it all,
astonishment in my eyes.
Poised, in my left hand
a sharpened pencil.
A pregnant woman!, a mother
is planning
her entrance -
Shushhh! you
don't belong here
you
are divisible!
She fades.
- Paul Klee
is intended to have a character of his own;
to be what no others are,
and to do what no other can do."
- William Ellery Channing
when we stop trying to conform to our own
or to other peoples' models,
learn to be ourselves,
and allow our natural channel to open."
- Shakti Gawain
since the beginning of time,
you are incomparable."
- Brenda Ueland
Each of us weaves a strand in the web of creation.
There is no one who can weave that strand for us.
What we have to contribute is both unique and irreplaceable.
What we withhold from life is lost from life.
The entire world depends upon our individual choices."
- Duane Elgin
there is some younger person who thinks you are perfect.
There is some work that will never be done if you don't do it.
There is someone who would miss you if you were gone.
There is a place that you alone can fill."
- Jacob M. Braude
is more
than you are thinking
you are
most of the time."
- Ram Dass
Yet you keep thinking
there is something else."
- Hsueh-Feng
"The greatest effort is to be really where you are, contemporary with yourself, in your life, giving full attention to the world.
That's what a writer does. I'm against the solipsistic idea that you find it all in your head. You don't.
The real life of the mind is always at the frontiers of what is already known."
- Susan Sontag
"Siddhartha learned something new at every step along his path, for the world was transformed, and his heart was enchanted. He saw the sun rising over the wooded mountains and setting over the distant palm-lined shore. At night, he saw the stars arranged in the sky and the crescent moon drifting like a boat in the blue. He saw trees, stars, animals, clouds, rainbows, rocks, herbs, flowers, brooks, and rivers, dew glittering on the morning bushes, high and distant mountains blue and wan, birds sang and bees, wind wafted silvery in the rice paddy. All this, myriad and motley, had existed always; sun and moon had been shining always, rivers rushing and bees humming always. But in earlier times all this had been nothing but a fleeting and deceptive veil in front of Siddhartha's eyes, distrusted, destined to be pierced by thought and destroyed, since it was not reality, since reality lay beyond the visible. But now his liberated eyes remained on this side, he saw and acknowledged visibility, he sought his home in this world, did not seek reality, did not aim at any beyond. Beautiful was the world if you contemplated it like this, with no seeking, so simple, so childlike. Beautiful were the moon and stars, beautiful were brook and bank, forest and rock, goat and rose beetle, flower and butterfly. It was beautiful and delightful to go through the world like this, so childlike, so awake, so open to what was near, so without distrust. The sun burned his head differently, the forest shade cooled him differently, brook and cistern tasted differently, as did pumpkin and banana. Short were the days, short the nights, every hour flew by swiftly like a sail across the sea, under the sail a ship full of treasures, full of joys.
All this had always existed, and he had never seen it, he had never been present. Now he was there, he belonged to it. Light and shadow ran through his eyes, star and moon ran through his heart."
- Hermann Hesse
Siddhartha
"Siddhartha said: "I have had thoughts, yes, and insights, now and then. Sometimes, for an hour or for a day, I have felt knowledge in me the way we feel life in our hearts. There were a number of thoughts, but it would be hard for me to communicate them to you. Listen, my Govinda, this is one of my thoughts that I have found: Wisdom cannot be communicated. Wisdom that a wise man tries to communicate always sounds foolish."
"Are you joking?" asked Govinda.
"I am not joking. I am telling you what I have found. Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. We can find it, we can live it, we can be carried by it, we can work wonders with it, but we cannot utter it or teach it. That was what I sometimes sensed in my youth, what drove me away from the teachers. I have found a thought, Govinda, that you will again take as a joke or as folly, but it is my best thought. This is it: The opposite of every truth is just as true! You see: A truth can be uttered and clad in words only if it is one-sided. One-sided is everything that can be thought with thoughts and said in words - everything, one-sided, everything half, everything is devoid of wholeness, of roundness, of oneness. When the sublime Gautama spoke and taught about the world, he had to divide it into samsara and Nirvana, into illusion and truth, into sorrow and salvation. There is no other choice, there is no other way for the man who wishes to teach. But the world itself, the Being around us and within us, is never one-sided. Never is a man or a deed all samsara or all Nirvana, never is a man all saintly or all sinful. It seems otherwise because we are prey to the illusion that time is a reality. But time is not real, Govinda; I have experienced this time and time again. And if time is not real, then the span that seems to lie between world and eternity, between sorrow and bliss, between evil and good is also an illusion."
"What do you mean?" asked Govinda uneasily.
"Listen well, dear friend, listen well! The sinner that I am and that you are is a sinner, but someday he will be a Brahmin again, some day he will achieve Nirvana, he will be a Buddha. And now listen: This 'someday' is an illusion, is merely a metaphor! The sinner is not on the way to becoming a Buddha, he is not involved in a development, although our thinking cannot imagine things in any other way, No, the sinner now and today, already contains the future Buddha, his future is fully here; you must worship in the sinner, in you, in everyone, the developing, the possible, the hidden Buddha. The world, my friend, Govinda, is not imperfect or developing slowly toward perfection. No, the world is perfect at every moment, all sin already contains grace, all youngsters already contain oldsters, all babies contain death, all the dying contain eternal life. It is not possible for any man to see how far along another man is on his way; Buddha is waiting in robbers and dicers, the robber is waiting in the Brahmin. In deep meditation it is possible to eliminate time, to see all past, all present, all developing life as coexisting, and everything is good, everything perfect, everything is Brahma. This is why that which is seems good to me, death seems like life, sin seems like saintliness, cleverness like foolishness, everything must be like that, everything needs only my assent, only my willingness, my loving agreement; it is good for me like that, it can never harm me. In my body and in my soul I realized that I greatly needed sin, I needed lust, vanity, the striving for goods, and I needed the most shameful despair to learn how to give up resistance, to learn how to love the world, to stop comparing the world with any world that I wish for, that I imagine, with any perfection that I think up; I learned how to let the world be as it is, and to love it and to belong to it gladly."
- Hermann Hesse
Siddhartha
"If you haven't tried love as an escape from life's harsh realities, you have my deepest sympathies."
- Loren Webster
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
° ° °
Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
° ° °
Illusion is the first of all pleasures.
° ° °
One should always be a little improbable.
° ° °
I am not young enough to know everything.
° ° °
The bond of all companionship, whether in marriage or in friendship, is conversation.
° ° °
Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.
° ° °
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
° ° °
We're all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
° ° °
Ordinary riches can be stolen, real riches cannot. In your soul are infinitely precious things that cannot be taken from you."
° ° °
- Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde
"Look at the fish swimming about," said Chuang Tzu,
"They are really enjoying themselves."
"You are not a fish," replied the friend,
"So you can't truly know that they are enjoying themselves."
"You are not me," said Chuang Tzu.
"So how do you know that I do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?"
° ° °
It is fairly hard
To lie when writing haiku,
Which is fair enough.
Nothing much of note
Happens in corners of the
Globe that are remote.
And, presumably,
The same applies to far flung
Corners of the brain.
No one has ever
Written a bible of how
To be a poet.
Being myself a
Minor practitioner, I
Think of this as odd.
It is, isn't it?
There is no way you can teach
Men to be poets.
And what is doubly
Odd is that true poetry
Is so beautiful.
I mean, you'd think there'd
Be a manual, a guide
To rampant beauty.
- Stuart Reed
bowing to the roaring storm, waving, swirling,
tossing their branches in glorious enthusiasm like worship."
- John Muir
<< Home